Three separate suicide car bombings killed 20 people in northern Iraq today, including a senior council leader and one of the bodyguards of Iraq's Kurdish deputy prime minister, officials said.

In the deadliest attack, at least 12 diners were killed and at least 40 wounded in a big explosion targeting a restaurant this morning in Tuz Khormato, a town 55 miles south of the northern city of Kirkuk, the Iraqi defence ministry said.

Colonel Abbas Mohamed Amin, chief of Tuz Khormato police, believed the suicide bomber, who was driving a white Toyota car, was following a group of bodyguards working for the deputy prime minister, Rowsch Nouri Shaways.

Mr Shaways was not with the bodyguards, one of whom died. The blast happened shortly after the bodyguards went into the town's Baghdad restaurant to eat.

Kurds, who want oil-rich Kirkuk to be part of their autonomous Kurdistan region, have been regularly targeted by insurgent attacks.

The restaurant's owner, Ahmed al-Dawoudi, said: "I was sitting inside my restaurant when about six cars parked nearby and their passengers came inside and ordered food.

"Seconds later, I heard a big explosion and the restaurant was turned into twisted wreckage and rubble. Blood and pieces of flesh were everywhere."

The blast set ablaze eight cars in the restaurant's car park, the focal point of a bloody, rubble-strewn scene that US and Iraqi police quickly cordoned off. Shards of glass, shoes and splattered breakfast meals covered the restaurant's floor as emergency workers raced around overturned tables and wooden chairs in a bid to treat the casualties.

The explosion targeted a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers carrying civilian contractors, damaging one of the vehicles but injuring none of its occupants, the US military said.

Further south in Baquba, 35 miles north-east of Baghdad, another suicide bomber killed four people, including Hussein Alwan al-Tamimi, 41, deputy head of Iraq's north-east Diyala provincial council since January, police said. Three of his bodyguards also died in the attack on his convoy and four people were wounded.

The country's raging insurgency has killed almost 800 people since the April 28 announcement of Iraq's new Shia-led government.

In a bid to curb the insurgency, Shia leaders have started reaching out to Sunni Muslim insurgent groups believed responsible for multiple attacks.

Senior Shia cleric Hummam Hammoudi, chairman of a committee named by the national assembly to draw up Iraq's constitution, said the Shia-led government has opened indirect communications with factions in the Sunni-dominated insurgency.

"Some informal and limited contacts have been established with parties that we label as 'resistance', so they can contribute to the drafting of the constitution," said Mr Hammoudi, a senior member of Iraq's largest Shia political party.

Experts have long maintained it will be difficult to defeat the insurgency by military means alone. Analysts stress the need for Sunni participation in the political system, adequate reconstruction funds and job creation as key to weakening support for the insurgents.

The contacts Mr Hammoudi spoke of did not include radical Islamic groups such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq, which has been blamed for some of the worst bombings, kidnappings and other attacks.